Making Workers Soviet

Drawing on such diverse sources as propaganda art, the trade union press, workers' memoirs, and materials in recently opened Soviet archives, this is the first book to examine the shifting identity of the "working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies. New essays by fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts to make them Soviet.

Initial chapters consider power relations and working-class identity in imperial Russia. The effects of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 on labor relations among printers and coal miners are then discussed. Addressing subsequent decades, other essays document the situation of cotton workers and white-collar workers embroiled within the ambiguities of the New Economic Policy or challenge the appropriateness of "class" analysis for the Stalin era. Additional chapters reconstruct workers' responses to the Great Purges and trace the significance of class in visual and verbal discourse. Making Workers Soviet will be central to the current rethinking of Soviet history and of class formation in noncapitalist settings.

11. Workers against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purges on Labor-Management Relationsby Sheila Fitzpatrick

12. The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Artby Victoria E. Bonnell

13. Concluding Remarksby Moshe Lewin

Contributors
Index

Making Workers Soviet

"This volume represents a signal event in Russian/Soviet labor history by bringing together samplings of much of the most interesting current work in the field."—Gerald Smith, Russian Review (September 1998)

Making Workers Soviet

"A very fine collection that explores intriguing aspects of the 'making of the Soviet working class.' Taken together, the essays define the contours of future work in Russian and Soviet labor history. This will be a benchmark volume."—William J. Chase, University of Pittsburgh

Ronald Grigor Suny

Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author most recently of "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:" A History of the Armenian Genocide.

Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

Mark Bassin

In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin investigates the complex structure of Lev Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union.